My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.

[on the screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally"] It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work.

In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies.

If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl Streep to play you. You'll feel much better.

Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life? "

And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.